John Peel’s Record Collection to be Made Public | Hacker News Reader

John Peel’s Record Collection to be Made Public

johnpeelcentreforcreativearts.co.uk

67 pointsharscoat15 comments

Every part of the music collection to be posted... except for the music. Oh, and the art.

{facepalm}

You know, if this record collection were to be shipped to a sane-copyright country, it could be digitized and posted online for the world to interact with. But the most likely trajectory of law in the UK is that it will never, ever, become legal to post this content online in the UK.

From an updated press release on the site:

"You will be able to see the hand-typed cards that John diligently typed for every album in the collection, the record sleeves, as well as listening to tracks via spotify and itunes where available."1

I'd guess most of John Peel's collection would unfortunately not be available on itunes or spotify. Looks like there will be a listing of the albums/singles with notes, album cover and a link to buy elsewhere. Not the digital copy so many would very much prefer.

The unreleased or uncut Peel Sessions would be of huge interest to many, if those are to be released, but also many of the rare & early tapes, singles and albums of influential, famous and not-so famous bands.

1 - http://johnpeelcentreforcreativearts.co.uk/index.php?option=...

As far as I know, the Peel Sessions are (c) BBC Radio, because they were recorded in the radio studio...

Yes, BBC allowed some of the sessions to be released. Sessions from 80+ artists, of the 2,000+ artists & 4,000+ sessions recorded, were released on Strange Fruit Records before closing in 2004.

List of those releases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Fruit_Records

List of artists & date of recordings from the Sessions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Peel_sessions

This will be an amazing resource if it included John's notes as they say.

How they intend to get the rights to EVERY song in his collection is beyond me but I hope they achieve it.

They aren't. They're posting just his notes. In most cases, they can't even scan the sleeve. Thanks to copyright, history will have a fabulous written record of all of the material that was completely lost.

Reading your comment just broke my damn heart in two.

It's situations like copyright that make me just want to go completely underground and write applications that are illegal, unscrupulous and unethical.

Heartbreaking and infuriating. My only consolation is that I suspect an epic John Peel torrent will pop up a couple years after the archive goes live. Without the bits, the online 'collection' strikes me a hollow facsimile of the real thing.

I suspect what you write would only be one of those three things.

Perhaps some of the money will go to preserving the records themselves in an underground archive somewhere in London (or another UK location).

My fantasy would be filling in a reader's card, descending the staircase, and reverently removing various treasures from their sleeves and cueing them up on a BBC issue record player (think heavy machinery).

But, I suspect you may be right.

Oh, well. Oh. OK. So...... yeah, that'll be nice.

I am actually sure that most of the Heavy Metal bands he played would gladly hand over rights to the music and artwork. They should talk to Napalm Death.

Would be so cool if they could contribute to existing initiatives such as http://www.discogs.com/ with links to the specialized Peel collection interface. Let's hope there's an API.

In the meantime, you can listen to every track from every John Peel Festive 50 at http://peelplayer.com

Disclaimer: it's a site I hacked together in a few hours for John Peel day last year

That's awesome, thank you. I suspect this will waste a lot of my time.

What does the site actually do? Did you have to find all the tracks manually on Youtube? Were they all findable? What happens if they disappear?

Cheers! Really enjoyed making it!

I compiled a JSON index of all the tracks from various sources. The site loads the index and calls the YouTube API to find the best match video. Simples! I manually blacklisted and whitelisted some video ids as reports of missing/broken tracks came in last year, but it's pretty robust as videos come and go.

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